Vivek Kundra, the Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the United States of America, in San Francisco, Calif. Wednesday March 3, 2010.

Vivek Kundra, the Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the United States of America, in San Francisco, Calif. Wednesday March 3, 2010.

Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova, The Chronicle

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SAN FRANCISCO - MARCH 03: U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra (L) talks with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom after a press conference announcing the launch of a national initiative to open 311 customer service centers to developers March 3, 2010in San Francisco, California. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra launched the national Open 311 Application Programming Interface (API) which will allow software developers to create web applications that will allow the general public to make service requests via smart phones directly to 311 systems bypassing often inundated call centers. less

SAN FRANCISCO - MARCH 03: U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra (L) talks with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom after a press conference announcing the launch of a national initiative to open 311 ... more

Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images

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Vivek Kundra seeks to streamline fed computing

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The Obama administration's top computer systems chief started a West Coast tour of tech giants such as Apple and Google on Wednesday to pick up Silicon Valley ideas that can help streamline a complex federal information technology bureaucracy.

Vivek Kundra, the first federal chief information officer, is charged with overhauling a technology network that has, over time, grown to 24,000 Web sites and 1,100 data centers.

In a meeting with Chronicle reporters and editors, Kundra also outlined his broader vision of how an overhaul using wiser choices of technology, such as cloud computing, mobile applications and social networking, could change the way government operates.

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With the administration proposing a $79 billion IT budget for fiscal year 2011, "We need to make sure we're not relying on the same old ideas and the same old approaches, to make sure that the investments we make are not on fancy or cute Web sites, but they are around investments that actually have an impact on the American people," Kundra said.

"That's one of the reasons I'm here, to figure out what are some of the other ideas and innovations that we can apply to the federal government, and how do we move more toward execution and getting things done and less toward great ideas that sit filed away in cabinets," he said.

Visiting tech giants

Kundra, 35, appointed by President Obama one year ago Friday, visited top officials at Cupertino's Apple, Mountain View's Google and Ideo, a renowned Palo Alto design firm.

He also joined San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to begin an application software campaign designed to nationally expand the use of the city's Open311 customer service center, which residents can use to quickly report problems like potholes.

Kundra is scheduled to travel to the Seattle area today to meet officials at Microsoft and Amazon.com.

In a 50-minute interview, the native of New Delhi said the federal IT Dashboard, a site begun in July, has helped make government more transparent by clearly displaying data showing the progress of more than 7,000 information technology projects.

The site has had more than 90 million hits, bringing greater scrutiny from the general public and members of Congress, he said.

"We moved away from the culture of faceless accountability to where we literally put up the picture of the CIO right next to the project they were responsible for," Kundra said.

In one instance, the spotlight forced the Department of Veterans Affairs to review 45 IT projects, ending 12 of the projects and saving $54 million, he said.

Yet he also said veterans still have to wait more than 160 days to receive benefits partly "because the VA is still passing manila envelopes" to process claims.

Paper census a 'failure'

To be sure, Silicon Valley hasn't been immune to failure. But Kundra called the Census Bureau spending millions on custom-made technology "a spectacular failure" because "here we are in 2010 doing a paper-based census."

The technology bureaucracy encompasses everything from how government workers acquire new software to how students apply for financial aid.

"How do you navigate 24,000 Web sites?" Kundra said. "It's also 24,000 Web sites probably on 24,000 servers. Why do we have thousands of e-mail systems?"

Putting people first

"What we're trying to do is make sure we put the American people at the center of everything we're designing," he said. "Unfortunately, what ends up happening with a lot of these solutions, the way they're designed, the way they're engineered from the ground up, the way they're built, the way they are managed, it's done for the comfort of the people within Washington, D.C."

Kundra, who carries both an iPhone and a BlackBerry, said he believes the government also needs to embrace the evolving "mobile computing revolution."

"This notion of deploying services on mobile platforms, that to me is huge, and it's an opportunity that's untapped when it comes to the public sector," he said.